Touchstone
by mleeph
Summary: Some standards are hard to meet. Doumeki x Watanuki


It is everything Doumeki has waited for.

The culmination of years of fragile dream-gems tucked away into a storehouse, the door now broken wide and everything exposed. They glitter, bright, in Watanuki's skin. He has loved for as long as he can remember, loved this beautifully fragile boy with the scaffolding of bones holding up his ruby heart. He has hidden. He knows the dry, aching, bone-bleaching feeling of thirst. He knows how tears taste in the back of a boiling throat, how bright things seem when you can only collect a sample here or there, tokens of affection that glitter quietly in the darkness.

And now all the barriers, the curtains fall away, and the slender body lies in strong, vulnerable agreement before him. Watanuki's eyes are lucid and expressionless, staring up at him as though reserving judgment. And he waits, motionless.

And Doumeki realizes that after everything, he cannot bring himself to touch.

It is as though something will break, he feels, if he moves. He will fall apart. If he lets a coarse, bow-callused finger touch that otherworldly flesh, he will mar it. He will somehow split the membrane between what is real and what is not, and Watanuki will slip away into the air like a breath of wind, a ghost in Doumeki's grasping hands. If he moves, if he speaks, the vibrations of the air will throw the world out of its soundless concerto like the pluck of a string a second too soon in a waiting orchestra pit, ringing harshly in the ears. So he does not move.

He cannot touch.

Watanuki raises a ghostly hand toward him, and Doumeki watches it spread the layers of silence. It stops short before his cheek, hovers there. The night runs over and around and between them, a barrier forming in its wake. They pose as though on either side of a window, neither one more real to the other than a projection, two fish on opposite sides of the boundary between midnight and midnight, their shadows pulled awkwardly apart.

Watanuki, it seems, has realized that he too cannot touch.

Doumeki watches as the hand lowers away from his skin, falls lifeless on the bed beside him. It is like a withering vine. He can see the doors closing in Watanuki's eyes, the quiet mandate evaporating. "Take them off. Your pajamas. Take them off; it's been long enough," Watanuki had told him simply, standing in the doorway to the room, a darkly pale specter with sapphire glowing eyes. The only words he'd spoken all evening, the only portal he allowed Doumeki into himself. Such a terrible beauty was in him then, such an uncertain hope. Perhaps we can change. Perhaps this will be the time when we move. But instead the moment floats suspended in a perfect cast of time, a bubble blown of glass and cooled to the point of brittle breathless stillness.

And now Watanuki waits, frozen, and Doumeki does not touch.

Watanuki waits, and Doumeki can see in him all those years of untouched madness. He has been his own asylum for too long. There in his core he melted down the grit and stone of the world and built of it a residue of gemstones and marble. From marble, then, he made his body, and from gemstones his eyes, Doumeki believes. Cold eyelids to shield the burning.

There is a shift, an uncertain dart of the eyes, and Doumeki knows that they are almost at the end of their dance. Watanuki will sit up in a moment. He will look at Doumeki long and hard and appraisingly, see only his silence, and Watanuki will walk out of the room and forget. The gems will pour from the Doumeki's cradled arms into icy grey oceans, swallowed up by his indecision, and sink away. "Close" is a thing you are allowed to feel only once with Watanuki. The eyes dart again, and a muscle tightens imperceptibly against the sheet. The great gates inch closer, closer, closed.

And something in Doumeki cracks anyway, despite having been so careful.

He knows he cannot stop what has been placed into inexorable motion. And Watanuki is like a pendulum, swinging faster and faster as it accelerates downward. He sits up, turns to look at Doumeki with that hard, appraising eye, and Doumeki feels the world breaking around him, the membrane splitting, the night falling into halves that were so near a moment ago they might have touched, feels Watanuki remembering why they cannot and must not and will not--

"Kimihiro," Doumeki chokes as Watanuki stands. But it's not enough. Those elegant white shoulders bob off into the darkness, and before Doumeki knows what he's doing he's behind them, clutching at them, pulling Watanuki to him. Under his fingers the skin is hot with the strange fire of an opal, cold and searingly brilliant. He pulls Watanuki down, into his lap, defiling him, begging for him. Waiting for Watanuki to turn him away, hearing a sudden breath catch in both of their throats. There is a second of hopelessness coursing through him as he waits to see if his die, cast, will shatter on contact with the earth.

And it touches, and does not break.

And then Doumeki is sobbing on Watanuki's shoulder. He cries because it can sate him. Somehow, somewhere, perhaps this can make up for all the times he's turned away. And he discovers that Watanuki has leaned back toward him, his back against Doumeki's chest. "Kimihiro," Doumeki says again. "Kimihiro, Watanuki, I love you." And Watanuki just nods, reaching back to thread his fingertips through Doumeki's hair, the slow strokes of a hand defining and delineating Doumeki's position in the surreal darkness.

"Thank you," he replies simply. "I was afraid you wouldn't."

And the doors break open at last as they sit there on the side of the bed, bound together, and glimmering with light.


End file.
